Billy Bob Thornton quick to praise Faster’

Monday

Nov 29, 2010 at 12:01 AMNov 29, 2010 at 11:27 PM

There have been so many stories about actor-writer-director-drummer-singer Billy Bob Thornton over the years: the accusations of drug abuse, his penchant for shooting off his mouth, that wild ride of a marriage to Angelina Jolie.

Ed Symkus

There have been so many stories about actor-writer-director-drummer-singer Billy Bob Thornton over the years: the accusations of drug abuse, his penchant for shooting off his mouth, that wild ride of a marriage to Angelina Jolie. He’s been great fodder for tabloid headlines, whether or not everything is true.

So it’s a surprise when meeting him for the first time that he comes across as such a smart, interesting, thoughtful, really nice guy. At a recent interview for his new film “Faster,” in which he plays a heroin-addled cop on the trail of a killer ex-con, played by Dwayne Johnson, Thornton praised the film and its writers, damned Hollywood, and went all gushy on his relationship with the press.

“I suppose right off the bat you see that the guy has dipped pretty low in his life,” he said of his character, simply named Cop. “It makes him a more interesting character than just there’s a cop in the movie. I think one of the flaws in most commercial action movies is that the characters are usually not very developed. A lot of times you have the movie star hero and then some nameless, faceless bad guys who are just there to be killed by the hero. In this case, the screenwriters gave each character some type of story. I think that sort of world-weariness of my character added to the movie because he’s not black or white. It puts him in a very gray area.”

Thornton said he’s not all that happy with most of the films coming out of studios. He has no problem with violence up on the screen, but insists it should serve a purpose.

“Most films now are geared toward the video game-playing generation,” he said. “These video games are people killing for fun, and I think traditionally in violent movies, there’s always been some kind of lesson.

“This movie doesn’t say, ‘Oh, here’s this fun guy and we’re gonna do this tongue-in-cheek character right out of a video game who likes to destroy things.’ This movie actually shows what prisons create, what murder creates. It shows a sort of perpetual violent string of events and asks, ‘Where does it all end?’ Nobody here ever intended to do a violent movie because it’s fun. These are dark characters who are in trouble.”

Thornton’s character is portrayed as a guy who’s trying to get his broken family back together and maintain a good relationship with his young son.

“If you get a good kid it’s always kind of amusing and sweet,” he said. “It was kind of nice just to lay there and talk to the kid about baseball. You look at him and you can imagine that he’s probably not very good. So it was pretty easy to feel something for the kid.

“We had a lot of discussions about how to be around the kid,” he added, referring to the ever-present studio PC police. “Of course, as usual, the top brass will say, ‘You know, you can’t smoke around the kid.’ And I’m thinking, ‘But [my character] can do heroin?’” Thornton has had a bit of a long-running love-hate relationship with journalists, but on this day he seemed to enjoy chatting, probably because he’s so happy with the way the movie turned out.

“It’s real nice to be able to do good work and come in and talk to you guys about it,” he said. “I haven’t always been tight-lipped, you know. So as a result I would get in a sticky situation every now and then.” But he’s no doubt someone who tries to please.

“I suppose there are guys who will not do a movie for three years, and they won’t talk to anybody, and they won’t sign your kid’s thing. Yet still, you just love ’em,” he said. “And then there’s a guy like me, who might say a few too many things, but I will sign your kid’s thing and I will tell you everything about what I thought about any chick or whatever. And because I will be your friend and I will talk to you – instead of the guy who won’t talk to you – then I expect to not get stuck in the (rear).

“The way I look at it is this: When someone says, ‘I don’t like the press and I don’t like the fans and I don’t like this or that’ ... well, the fans are the people who allow my kids to go to school and let me pay for the house. You guys are the people who get it out there to people so they know what’s going on. So we owe you guys and in return, if we’re gonna be forthcoming and honest with you, you owe us to not twist it in because maybe I said something bad about cats, and you like cats. So we’ll be good to you, you be good to us, and that’s kind of what I feel about it.”

The Patriot Ledger

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